Now, you might be wondering why that should be of any concern to a musicians' union or why a union set up (presumably) to promote music should be trying to ban a concert, but it's none of your business. As Wasimi points out, his union is the only body "authorised to allow performances by foreign singers in Egypt".

Last week there were two other developments in Egypt along similar lines. A group of lawyers launched an obscenity case against the ancient collection of folk tales, One Thousand and One Nights, and the interior ministry started to implement a ban on the holding of Sufi dhikr ceremonies in mosques.

All these could be described simply as examples of intolerance (which of course they are) but the enthusiasm for banning things is also part of something else: the concept of a "properly" ordered society that prevails in Egypt and most of the Arab countries. It is rooted in a fear of fitna – the social discord that would supposedly ensue if people were allowed to behave more or less as they liked.

So, to "protect" society from these horrors (and in some cases to protect the ruling regimes too), all kinds of independent activity need to be regulated. Newspapers, civil society organisations, trade unions, public gatherings, etc, have to be authorised and are subject to continuing supervision.

The ban on Sufi ceremonies is particularly interesting because it seems to have been instigated, not by the Egyptian government, but by Sufis themselves (or at least one section of their movement) amid fears of indiscipline in the ranks.

At a Sufi conference last February there were complaints about "intruders" and "false" sects organising events "not in accordance with established Sufi doctrines". Their offences, apparently, included setting up tents that were open to both men and women, and not dancing in the officially approved way.

Of course, all societies have rules. In many ways, life in Britain and the rest of Europe is far more regulated than it is in the Arab countries but there is a major difference in the types of things that are regulated. In Arab countries, regulation is still very much focused on "morality" and ensuring compliance with the expected norms of personal behaviour – territory that western societies, on the whole, no longer regard as a legitimate concern of the state. Indeed, far from fearing "discord", many in the west welcome the colour and diversity that differences bring.

But try building a house in Britain, or employing someone, and you'll immediately be confronted with a host of regulations – often very complex ones – that simply do not exist in most Arab countries.

Sometimes these regulations strike us as unduly bureaucratic but they are meant to serve the public good: we don't want houses to fall down or employees to be unfairly treated, for instance. This type of regulation is not so much a curtailment of people's freedom as a balancing of competing freedoms: the freedom of businesses to make money, for example, versus the freedom of their employees not to be exploited. In general the aim is to protect the weak from the strong and to shield the individual from malpractices, health and safety hazards, and so on.

It was a lack of this type of regulation that contributed to the deaths of more than 150 people when floods swept through Jeddah in Saudi Arabia last November. One important factor was the unregulated construction that had taken place over many years in normally dry river beds.

But protecting against disasters like that has never figured strongly in the Saudi concept of the public good. Instead, a huge amount of effort goes into ensuring that people comply with the rules of morality set by religious scholars.

Just a few days ago, a 17-year-old Saudi youth was sentenced to 100 lashes and a year's internal exile for having premarital sex. Meanwhile, road deaths in Saudi Arabia, per head of population, are more than five times the rate in Britain and more than a third of all the kingdom's road accidents are said to be caused by drivers ignoring red lights.